In mid November I found out I was pregnant. Unlike my last pregnancy, this one has been viable and I just hit the eight month mark yesterday. While I am over the moon excited to be pregnant and to be growing a life inside of me, I am also quite over it.
Pregnancy is…hard. And I have absolutely no shame in saying that I, quite simply, hate it. That doesn’t make me a bad person, although for awhile I thought it did. It doesn’t mean I’ll be a bad mother. It just means that being pregnant takes an amazing toll on your body in so many different ways that sometimes I just yearn for how it used to be. While the nausea and food aversions have subsided almost completely, there are still certain foods I used to love but no longer want. I completely gave up on running a few months back due to the pain I’d get in my lower belly and the weird plantar fasciitis symptoms I’d get after the fact. My body is changing and what was once bloat making me look as if I’d just simply gained weight around my mid section and making my normal clothes fit strangely, is now a full on baby bump that I can no longer conceal.
“But why would you want to conceal it?” people ask.
It’s not the stares or the people trying to touch my belly without permission.
It’s the comments.
“Somebody’s pregnant,” sang a random middle aged man I shared an elevator with at Fred Meyer.
“You’re getting fat,” jokes a family member.
“Has your doctor said if you’re gaining the proper amount of weight, or not?” asks one of my residents at work, five minutes after another joked that I was getting “tubby”.
I could go on but I think you get my point. When you’re pregnant, for whatever reason, people seem to think they have every right to comment on your changing body every time they see you.
News flash – they don’t. And I am FED UP.
I’m a fairly chill person. I can take a joke. But I’m no longer letting these comments slide. As if it isn’t hard enough for me to watch my body change I have to deal with comments from the judgmental older generation I work with to my own fucking family members to STRANGERS in the grocery store.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. The ONLY appropriate thing to say to a pregnant woman regarding her appearance is “you look great”.
That. Is. Fucking. It.
Pregnancy is hard enough without all the insecurity that goes along with it. You get the aches and pains, the food aversions, the physical imitations – you can hardly bend over to put your shoes on!
The depression.
Sure, I burst out crying randomly over nothing (literally nothing, it’s not as if I saw a sad commercial or read something happy), but I will, at random, just be depressed. So much so it draws me back to bed on the weekends. I withdraw into myself, ignore phone calls and text messages. I become almost physically incapable of doing anything.
So with all this bullshit comes the physical insecurity of your changing and expanding body. Your clothes don’t fit, your new pregnancy clothes make you feel frumpy, you even question if your own husband still finds you attractive. And what’s more, you can’t blow off steam like you used to. Because you can’t run anymore and you can’t even fucking drink.
So please, tell the pregnant woman in your life that she’s going to “get rotund” and see how that works out for you.
I hope she punches you in your stupid face.
Peace out, Seattle!
Rain City Life 